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In the case of Tree Rings, the PaCTS standard seems far from optimal for most users. In this case, PaCTS drew from an existing standard (TriDaS) as a starting point, but it appeared tailored to the needs of the archeology community, hence many of the properties simply did not make sense for paleoclimatology, something we did not catch until late in the process. To some extent this is a byproduct of a very small WG, as engaging more researchers to provide input would likely have caught these issues earlier on and resulted in a more consensual set of properties. But I take responsibility for not shepherding this process as well as could have been the case.

How to reboot or change course? Dendroclimatology has had its act together much earlier than the rest of the community so they have a minimal data standard (the “Tucson format”, as the initiates call it), dating back to the 1970’s, and clearly too minimal (e.g. it does not clearly indicate what data processing steps were applied to the raw data). Clearly TriDaS is too cumbersome/irrelevant for dendroclimatology, so what is a good middle ground?